Wednesday, December 10, 2008

An Open Letter to Atheists: There's No Need to Hate on God

I am not writing this to prove the existence of God. I have not “proved” his existence, but reinvented the understanding of God. Mankind has always tried to understand God on an explicit level. We’ve personified him, we’ve given him powers, we’ve made him into a man that had a life on Earth, we’ve decided that he wants to be pleased by the actions we take in this life and we’ve decided the actions to take to please him. We’ve been painting a picture of God, but who has seen God? No one has, so of course the picture has been inaccurate.In response to this misunderstanding, you have gone to the opposite extreme. You deny the existence of God, you ridicule any belief in him, and you claim you have a replacement for God. The atheist argument is this: logic is the only right way to understand the universe. Only ideas that can be supported logically should be acknowledged. Since you see no logical reason to believe in God, since God seems to be an idea which is juxtaposed to logic you decided that the idea of God should not be acknowledged.But, once God is properly understood, it becomes clear that God is a result of our reasoning. God is a fundamental component of the human mind. I say human because God is not a legitimate concept if our reasoning is not limited. But, if you had no limitations on your reasoning, you would be God(the omnipotent one).God, like everything else in your reality is an idea. Before we decide what the idea of God is we have to understand what an idea is. This is because God is a unique idea with a unique place in our reality. The one thing you have to know about ideas before understanding God is that there are a certain set of ideas in our mind are more primitive than others. They are the primary ideas, they are the ideas which we use to understand and create every other idea. These are the building blocks of our reality. Because of this we cannot define these ideas like we can define the ideas that are based upon them. A few examples of these ideas are: life, death, and love.There is something I want you to notice about these ideas. They are all the subjects of our forms of art, and they are also all integral parts of our religions. These are ideas which are always associated with God. This is because we can’t make sense of them on the explicit level for reasons just explained. Instead we understand them through expression and ritual.As for the idea that is to be discussed here: God. God is the idea of “that which cannot be understood.” This is why we associate him with the mysteries of our reality. This is why he cannot be understood on a logical level. However, if we think about the concept of God logically, his existence makes logical sense, even though we cannot prove him logically. If God could be defined, then the idea of God would be false because the idea by definition is “that which can’t be defined,” and if God can’t be defined, then the idea of God is logically legitimate. What this means is that God is a logically legitimate concept that cannot be proven. God is essentially the idea that makes the logical system of our minds incomplete. All logical systems are incomplete in their ability to prove everything that is true, our minds are no exception.If you understand God in this way, there are many ethical, ontological, and epistemological consequences that result from this understanding. The bottom line is that we should stop worrying about whether God exists, and start trying to understand his place in our reality. whether God exists, and just let him be.